


My Good Shade

by Kenjiandco



Category: Hades (Video Game 2018)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Established Relationship, Gen, M/M, POV Minor Character, Than and Zag being Than and Zag in later chapters, mostly - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:33:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27075022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kenjiandco/pseuds/Kenjiandco
Summary: There are red leaves floating on the river. Not cool glossy green like the trees in Elysium, but red and bright and out of place.They feel warm in Aida’s hands (when she remembers how to have hands.) Red on top and shiny gold beneath and they remind her of the leaves on the olive trees, in the little grove in the hills above Athens. They’re like drops of blood on the water (she remembers blood) and they come from somewhere beyond the river that borders Elysium.They form trails, if she’s paying attention, fallen leaves marking out a meandering path through Elysium, opposite to the way the river flows. Something’s entering Elysium, again and again. Calling the warriors. Opening the gates. Making it change. So Aida keeps looking for leaves.(Because I started wondering what would make a little shade decide to stan Zagreus, and the idea kind of ran away with me)
Relationships: Thanatos/Zagreus (Hades Video Game), Zagreus & others
Comments: 29
Kudos: 213





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, I wrote a backstory for Zagreus' little fan in the Coliseum. Fight me.

There are red leaves floating on the river. Not cool glossy green like the trees in Elysium, but _red_ and bright and out of place.

They feel warm in Aida’s hands (when she remembers how to have hands.) Red on top and shiny gold beneath and they remind her of the leaves on the olive trees, in the little grove in the hills above Athens. But an olive tree with yellow leaves is sick, _too much rain, her father said, when he didn’t think she could hear, brushing limp yellow leaves from the branches. Too much rain and not enough sun, it’s going to be another bad year. The trees are strong, her mother said, with no pause in the rattle of her loom. And the rain will keep down the fires._

But these leaves aren’t yellow, they’re _gold._ And they’re not sick, they’re _alive._ Alive in a way nothing else in Elysium is alive. They’re like drops of blood on the water (she remembers blood) and they come from somewhere beyond the river that borders Elysium. 

Aida doesn’t drink from the river. She knows she could, she’s seen the other shades who drink, who let their memories wash away, and maybe that’d be better, but Aida doesn’t drink. Aida remembers, sometimes. Some things. 

The silver throngs of shades in the mist don’t notice when Elysium moves. They drift along river banks, amongst the grove and in and out of the Coliseum as if nothing has changed, aimless as the butterflies. Aida likes the changes: they make her pay attention, make her _think,_ work to find the coliseum, or the docks on the river, or the quiet chamber where the sad soldier whispers to someone Aida can’t see. It staves off that feeling of fading, when she finds herself drifting, when she’s spent too long in the coliseum and the edges of herself begin to blur into the crowds around her. 

Maybe she can be a butterfly when she fades. Not one of the pink ones that spill from the awful glassy orbs, mindless concretions of souls too far faded to even remember what they are...but the purple ones, that flit among the bushes, that can sometimes be coaxed to land on a finger...being a purple butterfly wouldn’t be so bad. She thinks, sometimes, she remembers a purple butterfly. 

She remembers olive trees, and her mother’s loom, and rain. _Her father doesn’t like rain because it’s bad for the trees. Aida doesn’t like rain because when the soldiers march there’s no dust on the roads, no warning of their approach from the plumes of dust in the distance._ She remembers stories about Athena, who gave them the olive trees, and three brothers who gambled for three kingdoms, and a war before the world was born. She remembers war, she remembers smoke in her throat, and silver swords, a silver pin, _a purple butterfly on a silver pin and a cool hand on her shoulder, she remembers a boat floating on the river…_

There are red leaves floating on the river. She remembers there’s no red leaves in Elysium, and she makes herself remember how to touch, so she can scoop up the leaves and tuck them away. 

The shades don’t notice when Elysium moves. They don’t notice that Elysium is moving _more._ Aida is quite happy that her game has gotten harder...until the warriors come out. _The Exalted,_ the words hang in the air of Elysium, thick as the mist, _The Exalted,_ the greatest warriors of the age, but to Aida they’re just men with swords, and she _remembers_ men with swords. If there’s one memory that she’d give up to the Lethe, it would be the sword, _the sword out of place on his hip, where he’d hold their littler brothers and sisters, where he used to hold her before she got too big, the sword his hand went back to when he tugged it away from hers, “I have to go, Aida. You’re in charge now, Captain, look out for the little ones, won’t you?” Pulling away as she tugged on his hand, men with swords and the smell of smoke always hanging in the air no matter how much rain soaked into the olive grove and a purple butterfly on a silver pin_ and the red and gold leaves, scattered on the river banks, amongst shattered urns and ghostly shields, everywhere she looks. 

She collects the leaves and hides them away, in a quiet place beside the coliseum gates. She’s found an urn that’s not too broken, and fills it nearly full. They form trails, if she’s paying attention, fallen leaves marking out a meandering path through Elysium, opposite to the way the river flows. Something’s entering Elysium, again and again. Calling the warriors. Opening the gates. Making it _change._ So Aida keeps looking for leaves. She’d followed the river down from the coliseum, close to the spot where it plunges down into the darkness beyond a high barred gate, wondering if maybe boatman had docked, when she sees the leaves on the water...and the footprints on the bank. 

Perfect prints of two bare feet, still warm where the grass is charred black. Aida forgets the leaves in the current and _concentrates,_ glares hard at the ground til she remembers how to have feet (are feet supposed to touch the ground? She thinks so but it’s hard to get that part right) and compares them to the burned prints in the grass. Toes are in front, which means the feet pointed _that_ way and so did the person (if people face the same direction as their feet, at least, but she can try the other direction if she’s wrong). But the footprints lead (toes first) through an open gate with a broken orb above its arch, and the air is full of red gold leaves. 

He’s alive in a way nothing in Elysium is alive, and he moves like nothing she’s ever seen. The red and gold leaves cascade from a crown in his dark hair, a fiery trail behind him as he darts around the chamber and flame wheels explode in his wake. (She wonders if he knows flame wheels will let you get close if you’re careful, especially if you can snatch some fish out of the river. Sometimes they’ll even purr and let her scratch behind their wheels, and they hardly ever explode.) 

The last fireball fades and Aida hovers near the gate., watching him pause, and pant for breath. She catches a glimpse of his eyes through his hair, one red like his leaves...and the other _green,_ as out of place in his face as he is in Elysium. And then the golden sigils begin to sketch themselves across the ground, and he shakes his head and turns towards the Exalted shimmering into existence, a bright flash of light around his hand--

And Aida recoils, and darts away through the gate as fast as she can remember how to go, trembling all over as she buries herself in the mist. She doesn’t stop until she’s reached the sad soldier’s chamber, where it’s always quiet no matter how many mindless warriors fill the rooms around it, and dives into the little space behind the waterfall where no one can see her. 

Her favorite game, her red and gold mystery, her so _alive_ stranger from outside Elysium, is just another man with a sword. 


	2. Chapter 2

Aida's been in Elysium long enough to see some things come and some things go, but the sad, quiet soldier was there before she came and is still there now, unchanged. She follows the sound of the waterfall to his quiet chamber often, and sits under the bank in peace, listening to his soft voice as he talks to someone she can’t see. The Exalted don’t come here. She’s never even seen another shade here. She’s sure he could never see her slip down the river banks, but sometimes his voice pauses as she settles by the waterfall. And sometimes (more and more as the chambers of Elysium change more frequently and the warlike shades multiply outside) he stops talking like he’s asking questions of a distant someone...and starts talking like he’s telling a story.  _ You ever hear about Odysseus? His problem was, he was the smartest man in Greece. Everyone else’s problem was that he  _ knew  _ it.  _

She’s heard someone else tell stories like this, of his friends and their misadventures, someone else with a soft, gentle voice that sometimes sounded sad. So it’s his chamber she flees to, when she sees the sword flash into her stranger’s hand, huddles in the mist of the waterfall and wonders if he’ll have another story about Odysseus annoying his king again…

But the sad soldier says nothing at all, not for a long time. Not until there’s the clang of a gate, and soft footsteps and a red and gold leaf floats through the air, and the soldier’s soft voice says “Hello again, stranger.”

Aida curls up tight and listens as the stranger with a sword talks to the soldier. Words often slip and slide through her mind, especially close to the river, but his voice is soft and smooth and...and kind.  _ Kind,  _ in a place where not much is. She listens to the sad soldier pose his questions to a person who  _ answers,  _ who has questions of his own. Questions about another man who seems to be far away, and who fills the stranger’s voice with so much  _ love  _ Aida loses track of the words entirely. 

It’s love, in his words, in his voice, even in the way the soldier sighs when another gate closes behind him. Aida knows it’s love..but she also knows the drinking from the river would let her forget, and that the glowing warriors are called Exalted, and the butterflies are souls: things she  _ knows,  _ not things she  _ remembers.  _ Purple butterflies and silver pins and a boat on a river, those are things she remembers, without knowing what they are. 

She’s not sure which thing  _ love  _ is. 

Finding the stranger is like finding his leaves: now that she’s seen him, he’s everywhere she looks. 

His trail always starts in the same place, a quiet chamber where the river flows past a high, barred gate flanked by towering statues of dogs on guard. (The statues make Aida a little sad, sometimes - she often wonders how the dogs she knew in Athens lost their other two heads.) That’s where she goes when she hasn’t seen his leaves in awhile, and if she’s patient he’ll come through that gate eventually, in a puff of hot air and a stinging, hot-metal smell that’s quickly gone in the mists of Elysium.

What he carries changes, a sword in his hand or a shield on his back, or a strange metal sculpture with the head of an eagle that spits fire and leaves piles of little gold cylinders in his wake, like little open jars too tiny to be of any use. (She gathers them up anyway, and starts filling an urn next to her collection of leaves.) He’s often grumbling to himself as the gates close behind him, something about  _ father  _ or  _ Lernie  _ or  _ there’s just no  _ reason  _ for that many heads. _ A few times she’s heard him humming quietly, a pretty drifting melody she tries out for herself in her little hideaway behind the coliseum. 

The stranger never stops moving, but his path wanders. For all his skill in dispatching shades, he seems oddly lost once they’re gone. After one drawn out battle with a roomful of Exalted reforming themselves around their ghostly weapons before he could strike them down again (his great golden bow was firing bursts of three arrows in a wide-spread pattern and he couldn’t seem to hit with any of them, and Aida learned a  _ lot  _ of new words in several different languages) she watched him stare blankly at a set of gates for a long moment, before pulling a gold coin out of a nearby urn, flipping it, and heading through the gate on the left with a shrug. 

The Exalted aren’t the only change the stranger brought to Elysium. The boatman docks on the river more often now, sending nervous tremors through the shades who remember their own journeys to the afterlife. There are the gold coins in the urns, and wells full of dark glassy water... and the talismans that appear when a chamber full of warlike shades falls silent once more. They respond when the stranger approaches them, fill the chamber with golden light and chimes that shake the air around them. There’s one talisman that feels familiar, a simple golden shield, and though she can’t understand what it says to the stranger, her mind fills up the clatter of her mother’s loom and the calls of the owls in the olive grove. But its words aren’t meant for her _ ,  _ though the stranger answers them as easily as he talks to the soldier or the Champions in the arena at the top of Elysium.

Aida’s followed him from the gates to the arena a dozen times at least, and she still doesn’t know his name. The  _ stranger _ knows the names of every voice summoned by the talismans, the names of Champions in the arena, of the boatman and the sad solider...he even seems to know the name of the distant person the sad solider talks to, when he isn’t telling stories to the air. (He’d never notice yet another shade in the mist, so Aida thinks she’s quite lucky that he often seems to be in a mood to tell stories when she ducks into his quiet chamber, and even luckier that they pick up right where he last left off.) But even he just calls the red-and-gold man  _ stranger,  _ when he can be bothered to call him anything at all, and The Champion doesn’t care about anyone’s name except his own. 

She's trailed the stranger to the Boatman's dock, because the stranger answers him like he understands every sound, and Aida thinks maybe if she listens hard enough she can learn where to look for a  _ name  _ in those whispery growls. Besides, Aida likes the Boatman ( _ Charon _ , she has to remember that, the stranger calls him Charon,) even though the other shades shy away from his ragged face. He's  _ safe,  _ she knows that deep as the name of the river and the owls in the olive trees, even if she doesn't know how she knows.  _ She's  _ safe, curled up in the back of his boat bobbing on the current - he doesn't mind, just gives her a nod when she slips through the edge of a gate and floats along the river bank. He’s set out his wares, talismans and gemstones and a strange iron key, and that means all she has to do is wait for the stranger to come.

He's a little battered, though she's seen him looking worse (his last few trips to the coliseum didn't end well), burning steps still light as he bounces over to the Boatman and begins bartering for one of his talismans. And he's...shining, Aida realizes, in a way she hasn't seen before, not like the golden shields or the green fire that she's seen light up in his eyes. His skin is overlaid with a shimmer like sunlight on water, and it's coalescing in the wounds on his arms and his chest, filling them in with molten gold.

There's a purple butterfly pinned to his shoulder.

She’s staring at the butterfly, purple and silver clashing out of place against the stranger’s red and gold, when he reaches for the talisman. It’s something like a three-pronged flame, blood-red and blood-slick and when it speaks it sends Aida cringing back against the stern of the boat, wishing fervently for ears she could cover. 

It’s a voice formed from the echoes of a million blades meeting and the sizzle of blood boiling in a fire, and the words still aren’t meant for her, but it doesn’t matter because she’s heard this voice  _ before.  _

_ “This is an obscenity,” says the voice that was there in every scream on every battlefield. The boat bobs on the river, floorboards rough against her cheek and Aida doesn’t want to see but she can’t remember how to stop. “It is a desecration of the holy fields of Elysium. That thing-” _

_ “Is a soul in my protection, and you do not decide her fate.” _

_ This voice is cool as the ash, after all the fires go out, the wind in the stillness when it’s all finally over. Curled up in the bottom of the boat, Aida can just see the figure floating above the river, and the scythe blade curved above his head. He’s speaking to a shadow on the riverbank, but not one in the shape of a man: it’s just a hollow vortex of black and red, speaking with the voice of war.  _

_ “That soul has no place in Elysium. She did not die a warrior.” _

_ “She died a  _ hero.”  _ The ash-gray man shifts, and the scythe blade drops, cutting edge held low and facing outwards. The whimper in Aida’s chest can’t find a voice, but she turns her head and curls up tighter.  _

_ The Boatman stands beside her, tall and silent and immutable, holding the boat against the current. When she moves his head turns, glowing eyes in hollow sockets sweeping over her...and he shifts, ever so slightly: a tilt of an oar that lets the boat turn in the current, and puts the Boatman between Aida and the feuding gods.  _

_ The whirlwind of blades on the bank spins faster, crimson edges reaching towards the gray man’s scythe. “I am the blood on the ground of every battlefield. I am the light on the blade of every sword drawn in anger. You claim to know more of war than I, little pack mule? I see no heroism in a soul that never spilled a drop of blood.” Every word has the ring of a challenge - the kind of a challenge that doesn’t end with two hearts beating. The gray man sighs.  _

_ “No, you wouldn’t, would you?” he says, and shifts the scythe to check his nails. “Must we drag this out? My master will be wondering why my timetable is delayed.”  _

_ The reply is drowned out by the chime of a bell, and the silver mists are suddenly burnished, burning orange. Someone speaks on the bell's toll...and the voices of the Gods may shake the world, but this voice  _ is  _ the world, rumbling out from every rock and leaf and swirl of mist above the water. _

_ “You’re on the wrong side of the river, boy.” _

_ The rattle of the whirling blades is suddenly more of a shiver, but the voice still carries the arrogance of marching armies. “I felt it necessary to intervene, Lord. Your vassal  _ insists  _ this shade has  a  _ _place_ _ in Elysium.” _

_ The silence stretches long enough that the vortex slows and falters. Still absorbed in his nails, the gray man smirks. _

_ “...And?” _

_ “This realm is meant to stand as a final reward - meant only for the best among mortals! If you--” _

_ “If I did not trust my servant to do his job, rest assured he would not still serve me. If the integrity of the underworld concerns you so, take your blades to the temple and exterminate some satyrs. Do not further waste my time.” _

_ And the air of Elysium is cool and silver-green, and filled only with the burble of the river lapping at the empty banks.  _

_ “Thank you, Lord,” says the gray man. _

_ “Before you go,” says the lord of the underworld, and in his voice is the echo of every man with a desk full of parchment and an oncoming migraine, “would you care to explain why my sources tell me the Sword of Death is currently lying in an olive grove north of Athens?” _

_ The ash-gray man hesitates...and, for the first time, he casts a glance towards Aida. His eyes are the pale gold of the winter sun where it pierces the clouds: not soft, not gentle, not warm...but still sunlight. _

_ “It wasn’t important,” he says.  _

_ There’s a purple butterfly pinned to his shoulder.  _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hades has some work to do as a dad, but I think he's a pretty decent line manager.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on twitter @kenjiandco if you fancy saying hi. I yell about games, gay idiots in love, and wildlife biology in varying ratios.


End file.
